DAX 2009 and a brief note on Version Control

This is regarding AX development environment setup for different version control options which is bundled with DAX 2009.

Dynamics AX 2009 IDE can be integrated with any of the following version control systems:

A. MorphX Version Control System (VCS)
i. Out of box version control integration available with DAX 2009
ii. Developers can use shared AOS
iii. No need of Team Server *

B. Visual Source Safe (VSS) OR Team Foundation Server (TFS)

i. Local copy of AOT stored on each developer computer in repository folder
ii. Each developer machine needs to have AOS and database server (So, we need to have a Windows 2003 Server for each developer since AOS installation’s pre-requisite is Windows Server 2003)
iii. Additional server for installing VSS/TFS Server
iv. * Team Server is required

*Team Server also known as Team ID Server issues ID’s to AOT objects to make sure that all ID’s are unique when we work under version control. Team Server is a required when we use VSS/TFS as our Version Control System.

We need to evaluate our version control requirements for our projects based on the above info. What I feel is integrating with VSS/TFS would be a costly affair (considering the server requirements) but the benefits which we get is a proper build process in place. On the other hand, using the internal Morphx VCS, we get the benefit of a shared AOS but we won’t be having a proper build management. For e.g. suppose AX Crashes then the VCS is also gone with it.